SoroushVahidi/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Development and validation of measures of social phobia scrutiny fear and social interaction anxiety.
(1998)

The development and validation of the Social Phobia Scale (SPS) and the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS) two companion measures for assessing social phobia fears is described. The SPS assesses fear of being scrutinised during routine activities (eating, drinking, writing, etc.), while the SIAS assesses fear of more general social interaction, the scales corresponding to the DSM-III-R descriptions of Social Phobia--Circumscribed and Generalised types, respectively. Both scales were shown to possess high levels of internal consistency and test-retest reliability. They discriminated between social phobia, agoraphobia and simple phobia samples, and between social phobia and normal samples. The scales correlated well with established measures of social anxiety, but were found to have low or non-significant (partial) correlations with established measures of depression, state and trait anxiety, locus of control, and social desirability. The scales were found to change with treatment and to remain stable in the face of no-treatment. It appears that these scales are valid, useful, and easily scored measures for clinical and research applications, and that they represent an improvement over existing measures of social phobia.
Using Machine Learning to Refine Black-Box Test Specifications and Test Suites
(2008)

In the context of open source development or software evolution, developers often face test suites which have been developed with no apparent rationale and which may need to be augmented or refined to ensure sufficient dependability, or even reduced to meet tight deadlines. We refer to this process as the re-engineering of test suites. It is important to provide both methodological and tool support to help people understand the limitations of test suites and their possible redundancies, so as to be able to refine them in a cost effective manner. To address this problem in the case of black-box testing, we propose a methodology based on machine learning that has shown promising results on a case study.
An architecture for the aggregation and analysis of scholarly usage data
(2006)

Although recording of usage data is common in scholarly information services, its exploitation for the creation of value-added services remains limited due to concerns regarding, among others, user privacy, data validity, and the lack of accepted standards for the representation, sharing and aggregation of usage data. This paper presents a technical, standards-based architecture for sharing usage information, which we have designed and implemented. In this architecture, OpenURL-compliant linking servers aggregate usage information of a specific user community as it navigates the distributed information environment that it has access to. This usage information is made OAI-PMH harvestable so that usage information exposed by many linking servers can be aggregated to facilitate the creation of value-added services with a reach beyond that of a single community or a single information service. This paper also discusses issues that were encountered when implementing the proposed approach, and it presents preliminary results obtained from analyzing a usage data set containing about 3,500,000 requests aggregated by a federation of linking servers at the California State University system over a 20 month period.
Optimising thermal efficiency of direct contact membrane distillation by brine recycling for small-scale seawater desalination Revised Manuscript Submitted to Desalination
(2015)

A technique to optimise thermal efficiency using brine recycling during direct contact membrane distillation (DCMD) of seawater was investigated. By returning the hot brine to the feed tank, the system water recovery could be increased and the sensible heat of the hot brine was recovered to improve thermal efficiency. The results show that in the optimal water recovery range of 20 to 60% facilitated by brine recycling, the specific thermal energy consumption of the process could be reduced by more than half. It is also noteworthy that within this optimal water recovery range, the risk of membrane scaling is negligible DCMD of seawater at a constant water recovery of 70% was achieved for over 24. h without any scale formation on the membrane surface. In contrast, severe membrane scaling was observed when water recovery reached 80%. In addition to water recovery, other operating conditions such as feed temperature and water circulation rates could influence the process thermal efficiency. Increasing the feed temperature and reducing the circulation flow rates increased thermal efficiency. Increasing the feed temperature could also mitigate the negative effect of elevated feed concentration on the distillate flux, particularly at a high water recovery. Disciplines Engineering | Science and Technology Studies Publication Details Duong, H. C., Cooper, P., Nelemans, B., Cath, T. Y. & Nghiem, L. D. (2015). Optimising thermal efficiency of direct contact membrane distillation by brine recycling for small-scale seawater desalination. Desalination, 374 1-9. This journal article is available at Research Online: http://ro.uow.edu.au/eispapers/4237 1 Optimising thermal efficiency of direct contact membrane distillation by brine recycling for small-scale seawater desalination Revised Manuscript Submitted to
A self-charging power unit by integration of a textile triboelectric nanogenerator and a flexible lithium-ion battery for wearable electronics.
(2015)

A novel integrated power unit realizes both energy harvesting and energy storage by a textile triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG)-cloth and a flexible lithium-ion battery (LIB) belt, respectively. The mechanical energy of daily human motion is converted into electricity by the TENG-cloth, sustaining the energy of the LIB belt to power wearable smart electronics.
Learning Plannable Representations with Causal InfoGAN
(2018)

In recent years, deep generative models have been shown to ‘imagine’ convincing high-dimensional observations such as images, audio, and even video, learning directly from raw data. In this work, we ask how to imagine goal-directed visual plans – a plausible sequence of observations that transition a dynamical system from its current configuration to a desired goal state, which can later be used as a reference trajectory for control. We focus on systems with high-dimensional observations, such as images, and propose an approach that naturally combines representation learning and planning. Our framework learns a generative model of sequential observations, where the generative process is induced by a transition in a low-dimensional planning model, and an additional noise. By maximizing the mutual information between the generated observations and the transition in the planning model, we obtain a low-dimensional representation that best explains the causal nature of the data. We structure the planning model to be compatible with efficient planning algorithms, and we propose several such models based on either discrete or continuous states. Finally, to generate a visual plan, we project the current and goal observations onto their respective states in the planning model, plan a trajectory, and then use the generative model to transform the trajectory to a sequence of observations. We demonstrate our method on imagining plausible visual plans of rope manipulation3.
A gut (microbiome) feeling about the brain.
(2016)

PURPOSE OF REVIEW
There is an increasing realization that the microorganisms which reside within our gut form part of a complex multidirectional communication network with the brain known as the microbiome-gut-brain axis. In this review, we focus on recent findings which support a role for this axis in modulating neurodevelopment and behavior.


RECENT FINDINGS
A growing body of research is uncovering that under homeostatic conditions and in response to internal and external stressors, the bacterial commensals of our gut can signal to the brain through a variety of mechanisms to influence processes such neurotransmission, neurogenesis, microglia activation, and modulate behavior. Moreover, the mechanisms underlying the ability of stress to modulate the microbiota and also for microbiota to change the set point for stress sensitivity are being unraveled. Dysregulation of the gut microbiota composition has been identified in a number of psychiatric disorders, including depression. This has led to the concept of bacteria that have a beneficial effect upon behavior and mood (psychobiotics) being proposed for potential therapeutic interventions.


SUMMARY
Understanding the mechanisms by which the bacterial commensals of our gut are involved in brain function may lead to the development of novel microbiome-based therapies for these mood and behavioral disorders.
A Dual-Polarized Pattern Reconfigurable Yagi Patch Antenna for Microbase Stations
(2017)

A two-port pattern reconfigurable three-layered Yagi-Uda patch antenna with ±45° dual-polarization characteristic is presented. A driven patch (DP) and two large parasitic patches (LPPs) are printed on the top side of the middle layer, and the middle and bottom layers share a common metal ground. Two microstrip feedlines printed orthogonally on the bottom side of the bottom layer are used to feed the DP through two H-shaped slots etched in the ground. The LPPs are connected to/disconnected from the ground controlled by switches. By adjusting the connection states of the LPPs, one wide-beam mode and three narrow-beam modes can be obtained in both polarizations. A small parasitic patch is printed on the top side of the top layer to improve the pattern coherence of the two polarizations. This antenna is studied by both simulation and measurement. The measured common bandwidth of the four modes in both polarizations is 3.32–3.51 GHz, and the isolations between two polarizations in all the modes are higher than 20 dB. The low-profile antenna is very suitable for microbase-station applications.
Dynamic Malware Detection Using API Similarity
(2017)

Hackers create different types of Malware such as Trojans which they use to steal user-confidential information (e.g. credit card details) with a few simple commands, recent malware however has been created intelligently and in an uncontrolled size, which puts malware analysis as one of the top important subjects of information security. This paper proposes an efficient dynamic malware-detection method based on API similarity. This proposed method outperform the traditional signature-based detection method. The experiment evaluated 197 malware samples and the proposed method showed promising results of correctly identified malware.
Interactive Block Games for Assessing Children's Cognitive Skills: Design and Preliminary Evaluation
(2018)

Background: This paper presents design and results from preliminary evaluation of Tangible Geometric Games (TAG-Games) for cognitive assessment in young children. The TAG-Games technology employs a set of sensor-integrated cube blocks, called SIG-Blocks, and graphical user interfaces for test administration and real-time performance monitoring. TAG-Games were administered to children from 4 to 8 years of age for evaluating preliminary efficacy of this new technology-based approach. Methods: Five different sets of SIG-Blocks comprised of geometric shapes, segmented human faces, segmented animal faces, emoticons, and colors, were used for three types of TAG-Games, including Assembly, Shape Matching, and Sequence Memory. Computational task difficulty measures were defined for each game and used to generate items with varying difficulty. For preliminary evaluation, TAG-Games were tested on 40 children. To explore the clinical utility of the information assessed by TAG-Games, three subtests of the age-appropriate Wechsler tests (i.e., Block Design, Matrix Reasoning, and Picture Concept) were also administered. Results: Internal consistency of TAG-Games was evaluated by the split-half reliability test. Weak to moderate correlations between Assembly and Block Design, Shape Matching and Matrix Reasoning, and Sequence Memory and Picture Concept were found. The computational measure of task complexity for each TAG-Game showed a significant correlation with participants' performance. In addition, age-correlations on TAG-Game scores were found, implying its potential use for assessing children's cognitive skills autonomously.
Answering Top-k Queries with Multi-Dimensional Selections: The Ranking Cube Approach
(2006)

Observed in many real applications, a top-k query often consists of two components to reflect a user's preference: a selection condition and a ranking function. A user may not only propose ad hoc ranking functions, but also use different interesting subsets of the data. In many cases, a user may want to have a thorough study of the data by initiating a multi-dimensional analysis of the top-k query results. Previous work on top-k query processing mainly focuses on optimizing data access according to the ranking function only. The problem of efficient answering top-k queries with multi-dimensional selections has not been well addressed yet.This paper proposes a new computational model, called ranking cube, for efficient answering top-k queries with multi-dimensional selections. We define a rank-aware measure for the cube, capturing our goal of responding to multi-dimensional ranking analysis. Based on the ranking cube, an efficient query algorithm is developed which progressively retrieves data blocks until the top-k results are found. The curse of dimensionality is a well-known challenge for the data cube and we cope with this difficulty by introducing a new technique of ranking fragments. Our experiments on Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 show that our proposed approaches have significant improvement over the previous methods.
IC-CRIME : A Collaborative , Web-Based , 3 D System for the Investigation , Analysis , and Annotation of Crime Scenes
(2012)

Modern day crime scene investigation methods are continually being enhanced by the application of new technologies to improve the analysis and presentation of crime scene information, helping to solve and prosecute crimes. This paper describes a new system called IC-CRIME that integrates several new technologies to meet both of these needs. IC-CRIME employs laser scanning to produce realistic 3D models of a crime scene which it then incorporates into a 3D virtual environment. ICCRIME creates an integrated platform that encourages investigators and forensic experts to view, explore, and annotate these models at any time from any web browser. A key goal of the system is to expand opportunities for collaboration between professionals whose geographic locations and time commitments would otherwise limit their ability to contribute to the analysis of the actual crime scene.
Investment and Financing Constraints : Evidence from the Funding of Corporate Pension Plans
(2004)

I exploit sharply nonlinear funding rules for defined benefit pension plans in order to identify the dependence of corporate investment on internal financial resources in a large sample. Capital expenditures decline with mandatory contributions to defined benefit pension plans, even when controlling for correlations between the pension funding status itself and the firm’s unobserved investment opportunities. The effect is particularly evident among firms that face financing constraints based on observable variables such as credit ratings. Investment also displays strong negative correlations with the part of mandatory contributions resulting solely from unexpected asset market movements. * Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago. I thank James Poterba, Stew Myers, Jonathan Gruber, Dirk Jenter, Heitor Almeida, Daniel Bergstresser, Mihir Desai, Michael Greenstone, Robin Greenwood, David Scharfstein, Antoinette Schoar, Jeremy Stein, and Amir Sufi for helpful comments and discussions. I would also like to thank Rob Stambaugh (the editor) and the referees. This work benefited greatly from the thoughts of economics seminar participants at MIT, Harvard, Princeton, and the Kennedy School of Government, and of finance seminar participants at the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania (Wharton), Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, NYU (Stern), Dartmouth (Tuck), Michigan (Ross), Boston College (Carroll), Northwestern (Kellogg), Duke (Fuqua), and the 2004 Western Finance Association meetings in Vancouver. I am grateful to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College and the National Bureau of Economic Research for financial support.
Abstractive Multi-Document Summarization : An Overview
(2014)

In recent times, the necessity of generating single document summary has gained popularity among the researchers due to its extensive applicability. The text summarization can be categorized with different approaches like: extractive and abstractive from single document or multi document, goal of text summarization (intent, focus and coverage), characteristic of text summarization (frequency-based, knowledge-based and discoursebased), level of processing (surface level, entities level and discourse level) and kind of information (lexicon, structure information and deep understanding). Recently, the efforts in research are transferred from single document summarization to multi document summarization Multi-document summarization considerably differs from single in issues related to compression, speed, redundancy and passage selection are critical in the formation of useful summaries. In this paper, we review the techniques that have done for multi document summarization. Next, we describe evaluation method In conclusion; we propose our future work for multi document
Point & Teleport Locomotion Technique for Virtual Reality
(2016)

With the increasing popularity of virtual reality (VR) and new devices getting available with relatively lower costs, more and more video games have been developed recently. Most of these games use first person interaction techniques since it is more natural for Head Mounted Displays (HMDs). One of the most widely used interaction technique in VR video games is locomotion that is used to move user's viewpoint in virtual environments. Locomotion is an important component of video games since it can have a strong influence on user experience. In this study, a new locomotion technique we called "Point & Teleport" is described and compared with two commonly used VR locomotion techniques of walk-in-place and joystick. In this technique, users simply point where they want to be in virtual world and they are teleported to that position. As a major advantage, it is not expected to introduce motion sickness since it does not involve any visible translational motion. In this study, two VR experiments were designed and performed to analyze the Point & Teleport technique. In the first experiment, Point & Teleport was compared with walk-in-place and joystick locomotion techniques. In the second experiment, a direction component was added to the Point & Teleport technique so that the users could specify their desired orientation as well. 16 users took part in both experiments. Results indicated that Point & Teleport is a fun and user friendly locomotion method whereas the additional direction component degraded the user experience.
The "visual cliff".
(1960)

This simple apparatus is used to investigate depth perception in different animals. All species thus far tested seem able to perceive and avoid a sharp drop as soon as they can move about. Human infants at the creeping and toddling stage are notoriously prone to falls from more or less high places. They must be kept from going over the brink by side panels on their cribs, gates on stairways and the vigilance of adults. As their muscular coordination matures they begin to avoid such accidents on their own. Common sense might suggest that the child learns to recognize falling-off places by experience–that is, by falling and hurting himself. But is experience really the teacher? Or is the ability to perceive and avoid a brink part of the child's original endowment? Answers to these questions will throw light on the genesis of space perception in general. Height perception is a special case of distance perception: information in the light reaching the eye provides stimuli that can be utilized for the discrimination both of depth and of receding distance on the level. At what stage of development can an animal respond effectively to these stimuli? Does the onset of such response vary with animals of different species and habitats? At Cornell University we have been investigating these problems by means of a simple experimental setup that we call a visual cliff. The cliff is a simulated one and hence makes it possible not only to control the optical and other stimuli (auditory and tactual, for instance) but also to protect the experimental subjects. It consists of a board laid across a large sheet of heavy glass which is supported a foot or more above the floor. On one side of the board a sheet of patterned material is placed flush against the undersurface of the glass, giving the glass the appearance as well as the substance of solidity. On the other side a sheet of the same material is laid upon the floor; this side of the board thus becomes the visual cliff (Fig. 1). The Classic Visual Cliff Experiment This young explorer has the good sense not to crawl out onto an apparently unsupported surface, even when Mother beckons from the other side. Rats, pups, kittens, and chicks also will not try to walk across to the other side. (So don't bother asking why the chicken crossed the visual cliff.) …
Improved Redirection with Distractors: A large-scale-real-walking locomotion interface and its effect on navigation in virtual environments
(2010)

Users in virtual environments often find navigation more difficult than in the real world. Our new locomotion interface, Improved Redirection with Distractors (IRD), enables users to walk in larger-than-tracked space VEs without predefined waypoints. We compared IRD to the current best interface, really walking, by conducting a user study measuring navigational ability. Our results show that IRD users can really walk through VEs that are larger than the tracked space and can point to targets and complete maps of VEs no worse than when really walking.
Quantifying immersion in virtual reality
(1997)

Virtual Reality (VR) has generated much excitement but little formal proof that it is useful. Because VR interfaces are difficult and expensive to build, the computer graphics community needs to be able to predict which applications will benefit from VR. In this paper, we show that users with a VR interface complete a search task faster than users with a stationary monitor and a hand-based input device. We placed users in the center of the virtual room shown in Figure 1 and told them to look for camouflaged targets. VR users did not do significantly better than desktop users. However, when asked to search the room and conclude if a target existed, VR users were substantially better at determining when they had searched the entire room. Desktop users took 41% more time, re-examining areas they had already searched. We also found a positive transfer of training from VR to stationary displays and a negative transfer of training from stationary displays to VR.
When is it biased?: assessing the representativeness of twitter's streaming API
(2014)

Twitter shares a free 1% sample of its tweets through the "Streaming API". Recently, research has pointed to evidence of bias in this source. The methodologies proposed in previous work rely on the restrictive and expensive Firehose to find the bias in the Streaming API data. We tackle the problem of finding sample bias without costly and restrictive Firehose data. We propose a solution that focuses on using an open data source to find bias in the Streaming API.